Free Text Travel Searching Gets More Accurate with Eva

Eva, the Expert Virtual agent from Evature, is a natural language processing search utility that is open and available for incorporation in any travel website. It offers a natural language processing engine through its Evature Travel Search API, which is tuned to identify common travel parameters such as number of travelers, place names and locations, and fuzzy date ranges. Travel websites can then use these parsed information bits to search their system for matching flights, hotels, or travel packages.

The service uses simple RESTful HTTP requests that includes the search text and a few optional parameters to fine tune the result set, such as bias, which sets a home or origin location. The responses provided are in JSON format and can be quite detailed with many attributes describing flight, hotel, and cost. The documentation is clear and easy to follow. Of the 76 APIs tagged with travel, only seven are also tagged with search.

What’s unclear is where Eva is getting the data for the result set. Is it compiled from other travel sites and airlines? Could it be tailored to include only data from your site’s database? Good questions that would be asked in the first steps of evaluating this API for real world use.

Evature gets bonus points for giving us a demo to take its language processing engine for a spin.